Since mid-2022, AVReQ has been leading an action research process, in partnership with the Transformation Office, to support the deepening of transformation at SU through an embodied, relational engagement with the SU Restitution Statement. We are in the process of writing a multidisciplinary, collaborative book, including a diverse group of around thirty colleagues from academic and transformation practitioner backgrounds as well as some community-based authors. The aims of this research include:

• Expanding AVReQ’s localized research on the ‘afterlife of apartheid’ at SU, with a strong emphasis on further fleshing out AVReQ’s social justice-oriented contribution to the theory and practice of ‘the reparative quest’.
• Contributing to the theory and practice of ‘deepening’ racial transformation within higher education contexts grappling with the transgenerational afterlives of apartheid, segregation, colonialism and slavery, in South Africa and beyond.
• Contributing to the theory and practice of ‘racial repair’ within the fields of transitional justice, trauma healing, racial equity, conflict transformation, peace studies and memory studies, with an emphasis on adding to our understanding of the promise and pitfalls of institutional apology as a process.

This book and the collaborative writing process has significant institutional and social impact potential. The current title of the book is ‘Deepening Racial Repair at Stellenbosch University – Our Quest to Realize the Restitution Statement’.

Within institutions of higher learning, physical education was introduced to train teachers who sought to specialise as physical education instructors. With the introduction of the first teacher training courses in the 1930s, many physical educationists based at universities were vying for a more scientific approach to the study of physical education. The primary aim of this shift was to move physical education from mere teacher training to a redefined science of the body. Moreover, practitioners in the field became increasingly preoccupied with identifying the ways in which strata such as race, gender, and ethnicity could be refined and imprinted onto the body. In two papers currently under review, I analyse the development of physical education in both practice and theory. In the first article, I trace the rise and development of the Physical Training Battalion from 1938 to 1945. In this paper, I am interested in the battalion’s use of physical education as a means to physically and morally rehabilitate white boys and men with remedial disabilities. This was done with the intention to reform the battalion’s recruits into ideal citizens and model men. The second article is an intellectual biography which examines the published work of Anton Obholzer, who was the second head of the Stellenbosch University Physical Education Department. In this co-authored paper, we explore how Obholzer sought to use physical education as part of a broader project to restore the Afrikaner nation to its misremembered and mythologised ‘former glory’. Both of these projects demonstrate that scientific knowledge is not developed in isolation. On the contrary, through my work, I seek to reveal that scientific inquiry is deeply embedded in social, economic, and political landscapes.

This interdisciplinary book project brings together an international group of leading scholars across the arts and humanities to explore historical trauma, its transgenerational legacies, slavery, systemic racism, (post)colonialism, and processes of repair. It asks: (i) how do violent histories continue to shape individual and collective experiences across generations; (ii) how can we understand the persistent, complex dynamics of these histories and their impact on institutions and communities; (iii) how is traumatic memory transmitted over time; and (iv) what pathways exist to imagine futures rooted in liberation, social justice, and collective repair. The book aims to shift paradigms in debates on the afterlives of violent regimes, offering a global perspective with particular attention to the global south and historically marginalised cultural and religious groups in the global north.

Revival Reimagined is an interdisciplinary project that examines the affective power of religious revivalism through sound. This study analyses over 6,000 sermons and recordings from the 20^th-century evangelical movement, the Africa Evangelistic Band (AEB). By using machine learning tools such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the aim is to uncover patterns in rhythm, vocal delivery, and affective charge. The project integrates computational analysis with ethnographic methods and artistic installations, reconstructing the sonic experience of revival meetings. By investigating how religious fervour has been encoded and transmitted through sound, Revival Reimagined bridges archival research with contemporary concerns about faith, identity, and social transformation. This work contributes to broader discussions on religious ecstasy, sonic atmospheres, and affect.

Dr Akuch Kuol Anyieth is a South Sudanese Australian academic whose research focuses on violence, gender-based violence, and legal interventions. She is currently completing her forthcoming book, Decolonising Family Violence Legal Intervention Orders in African-Australian Communities. Her current work explores alternative, culturally grounded pathways for the intervention and prevention of family and inter-communal violence in South Sudan and South Africa, focusing on bridging legal frameworks and community-based responses.

Dr Sanan’s PhD research (an interdisciplinary study on the Iziko South African National Gallery African Art collection, supervised between art history and sociology at UCT), points to the need to engage with deep roots of settler coloniality evident in the cultural archives of former colonial museums in South Africa, in order to chart out more relevant modes of museology guided by an ethic of reparation and care.

Dr Sanan is currently deepening her engagement with archives and alternative expressions of museum work through two projects. One is titled ‘We Need New Names: On Difficult Knowledge and Cultures of Care in Southern African University Museums’, which she runs alongside colleagues from AVReQ and from the NAHECS at the University of Fort Hare. The second project is called ‘Museum as Imaginations: Studies in Alternative Museologies’, which takes the form of summer schools and cultural dialogues between a core collective of artists, museum practitioners, researchers and educators from Morocco, South Africa, and India.

This policy brief highlights the following: Key messages of mental health policy brief around the CAMH Strategy and Rwanda’s development goals. Thematic findings from consultative research on CAMH Strategy implementation among multisectoral stakeholders. Visualization of how implementation of the CAMH Strategy fits within Rwanda’s evidence-based mental health policy processes. Recommended actions for stakeholders to implement the CAMH Strategy.

An exploratory study on researchers, comprising graduate students and staff within AVReQ and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, working on themes related to violence, conflict, trauma and cognate areas. Specifically, the focus is on taking ameliorative action in the face of anxiety, stress and related mental health challenges encountered by researchers in their work and on how to better support health, wellbeing and sustainability in the academy.